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Oklahoma
Posted: Mar 29, 2024 9:35 AMUpdated: Mar 29, 2024 9:36 AM
CAPITOL CALL Powered by Phillips 66 3-29-24
Tom Davis
Ranked-choice voting and deferred maintenence of state facilities were the dominate topics on this week's CAPITOL CALL powered by Phillips 66 on KWON Monday morning with State Reps. Judd Strom and John B. Kane.
Rep. Kane said the House has continued to work to ensure Oklahoma has the most free and fair elections in the country. We currently have an excellent system and we want to ensure it stays that way.
House Bill 3156 would ban ranked-choice voting within the state. Ranked-choice voting requires voters to designate their top choice in a race, their second choice, and so on down the ballot. It makes voting more confusing and has delayed election results everywhere it has been tried.
For example, if a ballot has five offices and each office has four candidates, each voter would be expected to review and rank four candidates for each race, resulting in 20 votes. If no candidate receives a majority, the least popular candidate is eliminated, and their voters' votes are reallocated to their second-choice candidate, repeating until one candidate has a majority.
Ranked choice voting has already been banned in Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota; hopefully, Oklahoma will be the next state to ban it.
Rep. Strom said he also opposed rank choice votinon on a cost basis saying that it would cost millions of dollars to change the voting an tabulation machines not to mention the education campaign that would have to accompany such a change.
Rep. Strom also talked about the need to address deferred maintenence of state properties. Strom said that a lot has changed since the 1960's in that space is no longer needed for so many filining cabinets and that moving things to digital preservation is propbably more of what is in order. He said much can be done to make better use of state-owned space with a look toward the future rather than the past.
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